Stitched Tunic: Session 3: Cuff & Neckline Facings

We're gonna start stitching with our sleeve cuff facing. So first, we have our facing here, and I like to start by folding this upper edge 1/2 inch toward the wrong side. And I like to do that by marking myself one inch down from the raw edge. And that just makes it easier for me to match my raw edge to that line. If you mark your 1/2 inch line, it's going to be within the fold, which can sometimes be hard to see. So we're gonna press this down. And I have already marked myself my 5/8 inch seam allowances along the perimeter of this. And we have our slit markings that we transferred from our pattern. There we go. My iron had shut off on me. All right, so once this is pressed over, we're going to place it right sides together with our sleeve. And it definitely matters which sleeve that you put which facing on because we cut them both in pairs. So you can tell which facing goes with which sleeve because A, the side angles will be a little bit different. But an easier way of telling which goes with which is this slit marking is going to be on the back half of the sleeve. So we've got our double notch to tell us what is the back of the sleeve. And so this is on the back half. And with my lawn, it's really hard to tell which is the right and the wrong side, but just whichever side does not have your markings on it is the right side. So, we're gonna align all of our raw edges. And we're just going to stitch this lower edge and our slit. So I'm going to throw a couple of pins in here, just along my edge, and then over here to make sure I keep all my layers together. Now, just using our straight stitch and a standard stitch length, I'm going to start, not right at the edge, but a couple of stitches in from the edge since we're using a lightweight fabric. I don't want that to get shoved down into the throat plate, which can sometimes happen if you start right at the edge. So I'm backstitching. Even though this seam is gonna get caught in another seam and secure it, that seam isn't gonna get stitched until the very end. So, until then, I don't want this seam coming out, so we backstitch the beginning and end. And then as we approach this corner, we're gonna want to slow down, slow down, Nicki. And we're going to bump our stitch length down a little bit so that we make sure we get our needle right in that corner point. I'm gonna lift my presser foot and pivot to align with my next edge. Now, don't forget to bump your stitch length back up to standard. Now, as we approach this corner, since it is such a narrow sharp corner, and we're going to be turning our fabric around it, the fabric can get kind of bunched up if it's a really sharp corner. So we're going to get right up to this corner and we're going to take a stitch, gonna go up one more. We're gonna take a stitch right across this point. That'll give the fabric some more room to turn. And stitch right back down this leg. Do the same thing, we're gonna pivot right in this corner. Go right to the end and backstitch. Now, we've got a clip of it. So we're going to clip into this slit just right up the middle, right up. And once we get close to this point, we're going to do a little, kind of a Y clip. It's really tight in here, so just get, kind of clip into the corners of that point, close to but not through your stitching, not close enough that you'll create a hole anywhere. And we're gonna clip across these corners. And then we're going to press our edges open. I like to use a sleeve board here to get into my kind of small areas. So we definitely want to press this lower edge good and open so that we get a nice, crisp edge. And the edges of our slit, we want to press. It'd be impossible to press them open, so I just try and press them toward the facing, just to get that open a bit. We're kind of... It kind of takes a bit to manipulate all your fabric in this tiny little area. And then I've made a bunch of creases for myself but we can press that out later. Now, to press out these corners. There's a right and a wrong way to do this. So we're not just gonna turn it out and jab our point turner in the corner. You're gonna damage your fabric. So, I like to get my thumb right into this corner, along the seam, take my point turner, place it right along that seam with the corner or the point of the point turner right at the corner. And then we just turn our point right around the point turner. And it's beautiful. We're gonna do that with this side. There we go. Wonderful. And then if you have some puckers here, it means that you didn't clip enough into this corner. So you can turn it back out and try and clip a little bit more into that corner. Or if it's just a little bit of a pucker, a lot of times you can steam that out 'cause we're using cotton. The fibers will relax with steam. So, then we're going to take it over and press it again. And as we press it this time, we're just going to roll our seam ever so slightly toward the wrong side. And this is called favoring the seam. So, we're favoring our seam toward the wrong side because we don't want to see that edge right at the edge of our sleeve. We're gonna do the same thing with the slit, just kind of roll it slightly toward the wrong side. Once this is all pressed nice and neat and flat, we have this edge that we need to finish. So on my Tencel behind me, I just took it on my machine and edgestitch this fold because the print on the fabric would hide that line on my sleeve. But for my lawn, since it's a solid, I didn't really want line breaking up my sleeve and distracting from my decorative stitching I'm going to do around the cuff. So I'm just going to do a couple of hand stitches here to show you. So I'm just going to do a single thread strand for this, not the thread end, because I don't want this thread to show too much on the right side. So we're gonna start, turn it this way, start right in the fold. And we're just going to take a couple of threads from the right side so that we can make our stitch as invisible as possible. Then stitch in this fold. And don't pull too tight. We don't want it to pucker. This is just to tack it down. So this is just finishing this facing edge and encasing all of these seam allowances. So it's nice. And you can hardly see that on the right side. And then once we get our decorative stitching, you're not gonna see that little bit at all. So I won't make you watch me hand stitch. I have one that's already done. So, now we get to move on to the neckline facing. So, we've got our facing pieces. I have finished my lower edge here using just a straight stitch. You can zigzag or use your serger if you have a serger. Make it easy on yourself. So we need to stitch our shoulder seams on our facing and on our bodice pieces. So, with the right sides together, we're gonna align these shoulder seams. I'm going to pin my facing pieces and my body pieces so that I can stitch them all at the same time. I've already marked myself, my 5/8 seam allowance at the shoulder because I like to be prepared. So there's that guy. I'm gonna get my body pieces. Right sides together. Put this down. I've got a notch in this shoulder seam that we can align. And if your cutting is off at all and you need to choose a side to match up, match up the neckline side because that's going to be most obvious. Now, for these short little seams, when I stitched these, I'm just, I'm gonna chain piece them all so that I have fewer threads to clip. All right. So we'll start right here. Starting just a couple stitches in from the end. Backstitch. Taking our pins out as we sew. Don't want to sew over them. My grandmother would snatch me bald-headed if I sewed over any pins. Now, chain piecing, I'm just gonna butt this seam up to the end of this one. Backstitch on that piece. And then as I stitch over onto this new seam, gonna backstitch again. Yeesh. All right, I'll let my facing side in here. Butt those edges up. All right, and then once all of these little seams are stitched, we're gonna clip them apart, and then press them all open at once. All right. So we're gonna clip these apart. And press. Now, for these little seams you can finish these edges using your serger. And stitch and pink. Can zigzag stitch. Finishing your seam allowances is an important step. I'm not going to finish them today just for purposes of time. You would want to finish your seam allowances. So... Now, to finish our neckline edge, we want to get this, now open this up, right sides together. I like to sew with my facing side up, just a personal preference. And we're going to align our shoulder seams and all of our points and curves. So aligning these edges, this point down here. And I've already marked myself my seam allowance. And I drew the pattern for a 5/8 inch seam allowance along this neckline. But, so I stitched one with a 5/8 inch seam allowance. And then I did another one with a 1/2 inch seam allowance. And I kind of liked that one better. So I've marked myself a 1/2 inch seam allowance along this neckline. And I just found that a wider seam allowance along the neckline just makes more fabric for you to mess with along these sharp corners and points. So a narrower seam allowance, you have less to deal with. And you also, on this point down here, so we draw our seam allowance, you know, parallel to this cut edge. And that brings the point all the way down here. So if you have a wider seam allowance, it's gonna go even further down. So when you're looking at the pattern, and you look at this V and you say, "Oh, that's not really all that deep." Keep that in mind, it's gonna go way down there. So with all these points, I like to use a lot of pins, just keeps everything nice and stable for me. And as you are marking your pattern, if you wanted to, you could cut a little snip into the seam allowances at your center back, so that you could have another point to match up if you want it. But this matches pretty well. All right. I like to start stitching right by a shoulder seam. I like to go kind of behind the shoulder seam, start on the back facing portion, so that you won't really see where your thread joins. And as we go over these shoulder seams, we want to go kind of slow because we've got a lot of layers there. And going around these curves, just kind of shift your fabric. If you need to stop and lift the presser foot and pivot at all, just make small adjustments. You don't want to have a sharp pivot in our neckline curve. And as we approach this corner, just like we did with the sleeve, we want to slow down. Bump your stitch length down a little bit. Lift the presser foot and pivot. Now, if you are planning your decorative stitching around the neckline to be kind of wide like a bib effect, you might want to add some width to this facing 'cause it's just about two inch wide facing. Make sure all your fabric is nice and flat. Gonna go way down to this point. And just as we did on our sleeve, we practiced this already. We're just gonna go down to this point. And instead of going straight to the point, we're going to take a stitch across. Pivot up around this other side. Now, my facing, I didn't interface my facing. I know a lot of times patterns will have you interface your facings for stability. But my lawn was, it's a nice tight weave. It's stable enough. And I found that, so I did it on my Tencel. I interfaced my facing because that fabric was a lot more open and needed some stability. But also, I found that it just, even the lightest weight of interfacing kind of interrupted my nice, soft, flowy feel that I wanted for my tunic. It just made it a little too stiff. So, small adjustments around this curve. We're gonna backstitch. Then we need to do some clipping. Hmm. So I'm gonna bring it over here. Now, first, we're going to clip down into our center front point, just as we did in our sleeve, clip down the center. And then as you approach this corner, you want to do little Y clip into those corners across the point. We're gonna clip across these corners. And then, since we have a curved seam, we need to clip into the seam allowances along the curve to release that for when we turn it out. So, I do just about every 1/2 inch, do a little clip, so that can open up as we turn our facing to the wrong side. You might want to clip out some of this bulk in the seam allowances as well. Since when we do our topstitching or our decorative stitching, we're gonna have a lot of bulk there. And along the back neckline, it's not too curved. So you don't really need to go too crazy on the clips along the back. It's pretty straight. We're clipping just to, but not through the stitching, not close enough that you're gonna make a hole anywhere. Just enough. And when we turn this facing toward the wrong side, the fabric will tell us if there's anywhere there's tension that needs to be released. So there will be a pucker if there's anywhere you need to clip into. This is where having nice sharp snips comes in handy. I have four pairs of snips. I don't know why. I think I thought I lost a pair at one point and then they showed up. But it's handy to have one at each station 'cause I'm always losing them. So we've got our clips. Now, we're gonna turn our points out just as we did for our sleeve. First, let me press this. "Pressing is very important, Nicki, don't skip it," as my grandma would tell me. So we're going to press our seam allowances toward our facing, the wrong side up. Make sure we get a nice crisp edge along our neckline 'cause that's our focal point. And if we were just doing a regular old facing, this is where we would understitch. And understitching is just to attach your seam allowances to your facing using just a scant, scant seam allowance on the side of the facing. But since we're going to either be topstitching or we're going to be decorative stitching, that's going to attach our facing to our shirt anyway. So we don't really need to understitch. And we're pressing our... Do it this way, wrong side up. We're pressing our, this slit edge toward the facing. All right. Now, we get to turn our points. My point right at that corner. Gonna turn that out. Where's my other one? There it is. All right. There's our points. We're going to push this facing. So let's see. We're gonna push the facing under, toward the wrong side. And take a look and see if there you have any puckers anywhere. A lot of times you can probably steam it out. But if there's anything that's pulling, weird, let's look in here. We might. Yup, you can see this pulling a little bit. So we're going to want to clip that again. And then that lays nice and flat, beautiful. Okay, now with the wrong side facing up again, we're going to press this nice and flat, rolling the seam allowance. Rolling that seam toward the wrong side just ever so slightly. So we're favoring this seam toward the wrong side as well. So we're gonna do this all the way around. And on your point, let's check this. I want to make sure our point is definitely nice and flat. So on the right side, it looks perfect. So that's good. Roll that just to the inside. So you are going to press all the way around and then to attach this so that it doesn't flop out so that you don't see the facing on the right side, we're going to do our decorative stitching to attach that facing to the body. And we're going to talk about that in the next session.